An age-old theme permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
